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Playing with Pico CMS

I recently started working on reanimating an ancient site I had just sitting around as a backup. It was built on a very old version of Joomla, and while some of the content is still relevant - much of it is not...

So, rather than trying to figure out how to import all this content into some more modern CMS and then delete the old stuff, I decided to use this as an opportunity to play around with Pico - a PHP-based flat-file CMS.

The idea is that you can easily create content by just creating markdown files in the 'content' directory, and they magically show up on the site. Organization is as simple as subdirectories inside content.

Themes are just twig template files. I'm not a huge fan of twig (remember, PHP was originally a templating language... so why do we need something else for templates?) but I'll give it another try - I haven't used twig in at least six years, so maybe it's better.

So far things have been going pretty smoothly - I can just copy/paste the content out of the old site's database, and paste into into a markdown file for the article. I end up spending more time trying to track down other assets (images) from my various backup files - but all in all I've got about a dozen pages converted without too much hassle. Adapting the theme I downloaded has also be pretty straightforward.

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